"}Oh fun fact about the Japanese language, counting is difficult to pick up
Like to start with there are two different sets of numeral words, one Sinitic and one from Japanese/Korean roots
But past that each class of thing to be counted has its own counting word that you have to learn and use separately
Like you don’t say “I want two newspapers”, you say “I want newspapers in the amount of two \u300csets of bound papers\u300d”
It is incredibly tedious, learning all this shit. And it’s ambiguous as hell! The professor that ran my Japanese lectures, his research involved going to a McDonalds in Japan, posting up against the back wall, and tracking how many people ordered hamburgers in terms of \u300cgeneral things\u300d, \u300cmeal courses\u300d, \u300cflat objects\u300d, \u300csmall circular objects\u300d, etc.
Noun classification systems like this aren\u2019t unique to Japanese. Navajo has a similar system, except that it entails mandatory marking on verbs. And Chinese counting works in a similar way to Japanese despite the languages being unrelated.
And of course in English, we have our own native Germanic words for counting (one, two, three, etc.), but we also make productive use of Greco-Roman numeral morphemes (mono-, bi-/di-, tri-, quad-/tetra-, etc.) in latinate loanwords, including novel coinages made from latinate loaned morphemes.